


Warming Merry

by apple_pi



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Hobbits, LOTR, M/M, gapfiller
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-28
Updated: 2009-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apple_pi/pseuds/apple_pi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merry is a cranky patient, and Pippin makes a reasonably decent nurse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warming Merry

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for Marigold's [Tale Challenge 20](http://www.livejournal.com/users/talechallenge20). My challenge was to combine these two plot bunnies: "(1) Merry and Pippin compare thoughts/reactions to Bilbo's birthday party, and (2) Merry and Pippin retrace Bilbo's steps from his adventure, meeting Thranduil and visiting the Lonely Mountain." The story, however, wanted to be set in the Houses of Healing, during the lull after the Battle of the Pelennor and before the Battle of the Morannon, as Merry is recovering from the Black Breath. I don't know why, but there it is. There is also a shameless reference to an earlier story of mine, Turnabout, which I hope readers will forgive.
> 
> This could reasonably be read as gen, but there are noticeably slashy moments, so I labeled it as such.

I wanted to stay with Merry, but the healers sent me away. So I went to Gandalf, hoping he might intercede for me, but as soon as he saw me, he sent me away, running a message to the camp outside the city walls. I did as he asked and then plodded back up the streets with his answer. Gandalf took it without so much as a thank-you, but before I could ask him to tell the healers to let me be, he was deep in conversation with yet another group of Men. So I shifted and fidgeted and waited to be sent on another errand as the sky grew dark - only dusk, this time, and I could see stars, stars through the window! - and I stood as still as I could for hours more and then finally gave up and slipped away.

I left my armor and tabard on my bed, and it was only me that I took into Merry's room, only me in my nightshirt and bare feet.

"Pip," he whispered as soon as I crept into bed with him; of course he knew it was me.

"Yes," I agreed, and he lifted the coverlet to let me in.

He was warm, except for his hand, and I touched him again and again, face and hair and shoulder and breast, reassuring myself that the dreadful chill was mostly gone. As for his right hand, I tucked that right against myself, despite the shiver it gave me. "Ah, you're much better," I murmured. "I'm so glad, Merry."

"I've slept all day," he confided, and kissed my nose. "I've been lying here wondering if there are such things as larders and pantries and midnight snacks in Gondor."

"Certainly," I said, and I slid right out of his bed again and out the door before he could stop me. "Shush," I said on the way out the door. "I'll be back in three minutes."

I remembered where the kitchens were (naturally) and, reasoning that Merry certainly deserved a feast whether a meal happened to be scheduled or not, I helped myself to what I could reach in the larder. _Blast these Men and their unnaturally long limbs_, I cursed as I stood on tiptoe to reach a delectable-looking wedge of cheese.

I came back to Merry with a bundle of food in my arms, and found him sitting up in bed, looking anxious and pale. "Peregrin Took!" he began in a hiss, and I closed the door and crossed the room, dumping my loot onto the bed to cut him off.

"You look quite weak, Merry, it's a good thing I got us this snack." I clambered up onto the bed with a grunt. "Oh, my knees," I added; "drat them, they're not what they used to be, now I'm twenty-nine."

He giggled at that, and I grinned, so we set to in quite a good mood, not talking at the beginning but only eating, sitting knee to knee, sharing one knife to cut the sausage and then to spread soft cheese and, later, jam. I'd not been able to reach the wine, but there was water in plenty, cold and sweet from the springs that seeped from the inner walls of Gondor, where mountain and city met.

There was little debris remaining when we'd finished, and I disposed of that quickly enough, shoving Merry back into his pillows before he could try to help.

Then I came and climbed under the covers again, taking his hand between my own, holding it close. "You look better," I said, and he did, looking solemnly back at me from the other side of the pillow, knees bumping mine.

"I am better," he said. "Thank you." He kissed my lips this time, and I shivered and tried very hard not to cry.

"You should sleep," I said.

"I can't, I don't think." His eyes were silver-grey in the cold light from the window, and he looked older, my Merry. "I've done naught but sleep since Strider left this afternoon, I think." The memory of how cold, how sad and lonely and confused, he had been earlier, when I found him, rose in my mind's eye.

_He's better now, much better_, I insisted to myself, but: "I was so frightened," I whispered, and I know my lips were trembling, I know my eyes were full of tears. I could hardly see him, and his whole face went watery and blurry.

"Me, too," he said, and both of us cried a little, sniffling and clinging. And both of us, of course, recognised the silliness of it, and so we giggled a little, too, in among all the snot and tears and tight-clutching hands. The giggles lasted longer, as they usually do, and after just a few minutes - two or three or four, perhaps - we were quiet again, smiling red-eyed at one another.

"Do you remember Bilbo's hundred-and-eleventh birthday party?" Merry asked.

"I have a green weskit at home I'm not very fond of," I replied promptly, and Merry pulled away a little to give me a quizzical look.

"What in Middle-earth does that mean?" he said.

I draped my arm over him and pulled him close again. I felt I desperately wanted to keep him warm. "Oh, I thought we were trading random observations," I said. "Was it random questions, then? Or memories?"

"Nitwit," he muttered, and poked my arm. "I was just wondering if you remembered it, is all."

"Of course," I said stoutly, although really so many stories had been told that my memory of it - a child's memory of an event nearly two decades in the past - was fuzzy, overlaid with family legend and oft-repeated tales. "I remember you kept Gandalf from turning me to a toad," I added, for I did remember that.

"That's right, I did." Merry smiled, then grew pensive. "I was just thinking that the moment when Bilbo disappeared is when all this began for us."

"I thought it one of Gandalf's tricks," I said. "I remember thinking it was nothing much, compared to the fireworks. And I think I fell asleep quite soon afterward."

"You were such a baby," Merry teased. "I thought it odd, but I was more concerned with finding Estella Bolger - she'd nicked my tobacco pouch while we were dancing, and it was brand new. I'd just got it for my birthday, my first pouch and pipe. I wanted Bilbo to hurry up so I could go on looking for her and get them back."

"Get to pinch her, more like," I said.

"Beast." He pinched me.

"Don't try to substitute me for her," I protested, giggling, and he swatted me hard enough that I yelped. "O cruelty!" I cried. "I thought you swore to Gandalf to _protect_ me that day!"

"Shh," Merry hissed, "quieter." He didn't swat me again, though, but pulled me closer and this time it was he who pushed his cold right hand against my chest. "No-one can protect you from your own tongue, Peregrin."

I chafed his hand and poked said tongue out at him, then withdrew it and we lay in companionable silence for a while as I rubbed his chilly fingers, wishing they would warm. I was growing sleepy, and I yawned and then said, "I don't think it all began when Bilbo disappeared, though."

"What do you mean?" Merry's left hand came up to stroke my hair and I yawned again, cavernously.

"I just mean - oh, ahhhhh, m'sorry -" Merry echoed my yawn and I laughed and then went on. "I just mean I suppose you should say that it all began when Bilbo found the ring, all those years ago in the Misty Mountains."

"Perhaps so," Merry mused. His fingers kept pushing through my hair and I was just on the verge of sleeping, dreams swimming about the edges of my thoughts, when he spoke again, softly. "Perhaps when this is all over we shall have peace," he said. "We could retrace Bilbo's journey, just you and me, Pip."

"That'd be good," I mumbled, feeling my limbs too heavy to move, my eyelids heavier still. "But not the trolls."

"No goblins under the mountains, either," he said. "But Beorn, perhaps, and we could go to see the Woodland Elves."

"Legolas... Legolas could take us," I slurred, and my dreams became dreams of Lothlorien, for there dwelt the only Wood Elves I knew.

"We could meet his father, and apologise for Bilbo's depredations," Merry giggled, and in my dreams the Elves laughed, too, and sang their nonsense songs, and paced tall through the green forest. "And then Gimli could take us to the Lonely Mountain," Merry said, and it was the last thing I heard, as Dwarves came to dance in stately tread with the Elves.

When I woke Merry was curled against me, and I thought perhaps his hand was warmer. I breathed on it anyway, and held it cupped in my two hands, close to my mouth.

"Mmm," he mumbled, waking, and he pulled his hand away but huddled closer. "Thank you."

"Thank _you_," I said, pulling the coverlet over our heads to block the morning sunlight.

"Whafor?" His face still looked older, but when he opened his eyes and smiled at me he almost looked the same. I could almost erase the heartbreak and terror I'd felt yesterday on the battlefield, and in the streets of this beautiful, cold city as I led him through it, seeking help.

I pushed his hair from his brow. "I dreamt all night of the Elves of Mirkwood, and of the Lonely Mountain."

"Good dreams?" He closed his eyes again.

"Yes," I said. "And I was afraid I would dream of, of other things, you know."

"I dreamt more easily with you here as well," Merry said. "Perhaps I should thank you again."

"You can thank him later," came a familiar voice, and the blanket was pulled abruptly away from our heads.

We both squinted and cried out against this cruelty, but Gimli had no mercy, and Legolas, grinning behind him most un-Elvishly, seemed disinclined to intervene on our behalf. "Your colleagues are seeking you," he said to me, and it took my sleepy head a moment to decipher his meaning.

"Oh, bugger," I groaned, "I suppose they'll want me running messages again all day." I sat up and scrubbed my hair, not caring that it would make it stand up all over my head.

Gimli tossed my trousers and a clean-ish shirt over my head - he must have brought them from the room I'd shared with Gandalf. "Only somewhat," he rumbled, "they do want you, but Gandalf says you shall be spared as often as you may to be here, with Master Meriadoc."

I sighed and grumbled and moaned, but I knew the quicker I left the quicker I could be back, and so I pulled on my clothing and kissed Merry goodbye on the cheek. "You'll stay with him?" I asked at the door, turning fiercely on Legolas and Gimli. "One of you must stay with him!"

"I'll be fine," Merry started, but Gimli had already seated himself on the one sturdy chair.

"I'm staying," he said. "The Elf is wanted," with a sardonic look somewhere under all that hair, "the Dwarf, less so."

"And when they do want the Dwarf," Legolas said smoothly, tugging ungently at my hair to straighten it, "I shall come and be with Merry. Unless," he added, "you are back yourself, as I am certain will be the case."

"You can all get out," Merry said, stifling gladness under peevishness, and he threw a pillow at Gimli.

"Watch out for him," I said, pushing the Elf out ahead of me. "He's a cranky patient."

I dodged the next pillow and laughed as I trotted down the corridor after Legolas.

 

 

~ _end_ ~ 


End file.
